“Uncle!” calls the twenty-year-old with the red cap: “Uncle! When are you coming down again?” The uniformed man with the black mustache and beret of the paramilitary police looks amazed through the bars into the prison van. The demonstrator has just been arrested. Now he is exposing the state power with his smartphone.
“When are you coming back down, uncle?” is what you ask an annoying family member in India who is on the move at every opportunity, but not the police. But since hundreds of thousands of Indian young people protested two weeks ago to force the resignation of the education minister and made fun of the Indian security forces, the government and, above all, Prime Minister Narendra Modi personally in countless “memes,” as the short videos, images and texts on “social media” are called, it is clear that Generation Z has established a completely new form of opposition in the country: digital protest. It is a group of 400 million Indians born between 1997 and 2012.
The police and the Prime Minister are being made fun of on social media
This was triggered by the scandal over questions from the medical university examination held across the country that had been skipped in advance. After the government had the nerve-wracking test repeated, which is so crucial for the future of the more than two million applicants that young people have been preparing for it for years, there were at least a dozen suicides. After the “Cockroach” party, founded by young people as a satire, called for a demonstration against the state and the high youth unemployment in the country via its Instagram account, the masses came to the capital and made fun of the authorities in an unprecedented way on social media.
The fact that the young people shouted to the police officers who were beating them with batons whether they had had a good breakfast in the morning went just as viral in India as the cheerful arrestees, who even joked about the state power from the police car. Parodies of the 75-year-old Modi, in which young people smeared bath foam on their faces to imitate the white beard of the prime minister, who was previously considered untouchable, flooded the Internet. Police officers wielding batons were integrated into the visuals of the mobile game “Subway Surfers” and accompanied by the accompanying music.
With the smartphone as a weapon, Generation Z is becoming a countervailing force
What was already evident in the mass uprisings in Bangladesh and Nepal, which drove the governments out of office in India's neighboring countries with youth protests organized via social media, now also applies to India: digital modernity is giving the young generation a previously completely unfamiliar countervailing power. However, not only that.
On the other hand, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasing the pressure on the already tight labor market, which is the underlying cause of the protests. When the American AI developer Anthropic introduced new tools in the spring that automate many previously routine tasks such as software testing, programming and data analysis, the share prices of India's IT giants such as Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and HCLTech plummeted and destroyed billions of dollars in value.
If the introduction of AI in India goes wrong, it could cost the country a quarter of jobs in the IT sector alone, calculates NITI Aayog, the government's top policy think tank that is responsible for drawing up guidelines for economic policy. That would be two million fewer jobs than today. By 2030, 60 percent of formal work in India can be automated. People in the country do not realize the risk of AI, said Kunal Shah, the country's best-known start-up entrepreneur and recently international head of the Meta messaging service Whatsapp. 90 percent of employees will no longer have their job in ten years - but that doesn't mean that they will be unemployed. Only poorer. AI takes away the chances of increasing income: “Unless people get great at using AI for their work.”
One IT company is laying off 3,000 people because of AI. The other is hiring.
This almost sounds like a reassurance given the mistrust with which India's youth views the AI world of tomorrow. The job market for academics is already a catastrophe. Just seven percent of university graduates find a permanent job in their first year. According to the State of Working India study by Azim Premji University, which collected these figures, 40 percent of university graduates of less than 25 years are unemployed.
Now there is also the fear of AI. In one study, 70 percent of Generation Z said they were afraid of losing their jobs to AI - while an even higher proportion, 80 percent of respondents, said they were curious about AI tools. Even Indian commentators were surprised at how tech-savvy young Indians showed themselves in the recent protests. This suggests that they have managed to adapt to the new AI world and that the technological contradiction in the lives of Generation Z is actually not a contradiction at all. Or is it?
A look into the corporate world does not bring any clarity. The TCS group, which had lost 22 billion euros in market value in the spring due to investors' fears of AI, had 24,000 fewer employees year-on-year at the end of its financial year in March, which the rating agency Standard & Poors sees as a sign that AI is replacing many tasks, especially in middle and upper management. The company itself denies this - and in the first quarter of the new financial year, which has just ended, announced an increase in the number of employees, albeit at the lower qualification level: 14,000 young people were hired by the IT service provider from Mumbai, more than ever before in such a short period of time. CEO K Krithivasan has described the “AI worry and anxiety” as exaggerated. Technology will change jobs, but will not destroy the traditional IT industry. It is unrealistic for large language models to replace classic business software.
The question may not be whether AI will put the masses out of work
That sounds hopeful. If it weren't for the case of HCLTech, the other company that lost 15 percent of its stock market value over February because of precisely this AI panic. The company from the “city of the future” Noida near Delhi, which employs 223,000 people worldwide, reduced its workforce by more than 3,000 in the last financial quarter. The reason: Employees have significantly increased their productivity through AI - as a result, HCLTech needs less human labor.
There is no shortage of prophecies from Indian IT CEOs who predict that the industry will need fewer people in the future because it can also increase sales with AI. But the renowned labor market expert Manish Sabharwal believes that fixating on the question of whether AI creates or destroys jobs is the wrong one. The founder of TeamLease, one of the largest employment agencies in the country, formerly sat on the board of the Indian central bank and advises the government on jobs and education. Like start-up founder Kunal Shah, Sabharwal is of the opinion that in the future the country's fate will be decided more by the distribution of productivity gains from AI. Are these distributed widely across the country and do they make jobs better across the board? Or will just a few of the giants like TCS and HCLTech invest billions in AI, thereby increasing their sales and market share while reducing wages?
Where will AI increase productivity?
The corporations in particular will probably win. This is what Sabharwal fears. Unemployment in India among the total population is officially not that high at 5.5 percent. But the statistics are misleading. Many people do so-called informal work, in tiny, unproductive businesses like the hairdressing salon on the side street, where only one person cuts hair, namely the boss himself. Because there is no one else. “Employer unemployment” is what the entrepreneur calls the corner shops, motorcycle repair shops and snack bars where wages never rise, there is no AI training and no opportunities for advancement.
This will not change if the hairdresser uses a chatbot on his smartphone, says Sabharwal. If India does not manage to use AI to create better jobs that are more productive, then salaries in large companies risk falling, while young people will fail even more often because of the now even higher barrier to entry into the job market.
“Where are the jobs?” was written on the posters of the demonstrators in Delhi. When Narendra Modi hosted his pompous “India AI Summit” in the capital in February, dozens of bare-chested people stormed into the expo halls to protest against the celebration of artificial intelligence, while at the same time the technology is costing massive numbers of jobs.
Even primary schools are supposed to teach AI - but often there are no computers
In fact, the advice from those profiting from the digital revolution like WhatsApp boss Kunal Shah sounds cheap when the multimillionaire asks his young compatriots that they will have to learn much more independently in the future in order not to drown in the new AI world. The magazine “Outlook” has just conducted a wide-ranging investigation into India’s ambitious plans to anchor AI in elementary school. The result: The division in the country threatens to become larger rather than smaller as a result of AI.
Development economist Santosh Mehrotra warns that a new divide is emerging between children like the elite student Pranet, who develops AI tools himself, and the girl Afreen from the slum, who has heard about AI but cannot use AI because of the lack of computers in her school. There is no shortage of examples of public schools where more than 1,000 students share twelve outdated computers.
When the government counted last year, a third of schools had no internet access at all. And if there is one, it is often financed by the teachers out of their own pockets. But in surveys, one in two of them cannot correctly answer the question of whether AI can make conscious decisions like a human. These are not good conditions for Indian children. If an entire generation starts adulthood without AI skills, India's demographic bonus risks turning into a burden, fears economist Mehrotra.
Then inequality could rise again in India, which, according to the World Bank, has fallen in recent years, at least as measured by consumption. Incomes are already drifting apart. The top ten percent of the population now earns 13 times as much as the bottom ten percent. When it comes to wealth, the richest percent of the population accounts for 40 percent of the wealth - more than in Brazil, for example.
But there is the countervailing digital power with which young people could soon take to the streets to demand an end to the analog educational infrastructure so as not to be left behind in the AI age. The Protestants did not want to abolish capitalism, comments the Indian Express. They demanded education and work and realized that nothing would happen if they kept their mouths shut like their parents. For almost sixty years, India's government has promised to increase spending on education to six percent of gross domestic product. But the amount remains fixed at four percent, which is only slightly more than the expenditure on infrastructure.
We need to listen more to the youth, Modi just said, after they briefly brought his government to its knees. So far, the Prime Minister has mainly celebrated new bridges and railway lines on the Alte-Leute Canal X. For a few days now he has been speaking directly to Generation Z on Instagram: “Hi, friends” and perhaps soon to a chatbot on brand new computers in classrooms in the countryside.
